Cradle Lake

by Ronald Malfi

  Something burned the side of his face.

  He opened his eyes. Heather’s fingernails were clawing at his right cheek, strong enough to draw blood. Her other arm flailed, and her hips bucked against the mattress.

  Alan sat up—and found he had one hand pressed over her nose and mouth.

  He pulled his arm away, and Heather immediately gasped for air. He went to her, attempting to comfort and cradle, but she instinctively shoved him away. He backed off, too afraid to approach her again and upset her further, too afraid and distrustful of himself at that moment. “Baby …”

  “I’m okay,” she wheezed. “Just … give me a minute.”

  “Fuck, hon, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” She sat up against the headboard and allowed her breathing to regain its normal, regulated pattern. “You must have been having one fucked-up dream, brother.”

  “I … I don’t remember …”

  Heather tittered like a schoolgirl. Pulling her knees up to her belly, she cradled herself and rocked slightly against the headboard.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what the hell happened. Are you okay?”

  She swung her legs off the bed. “I have to pee.”

  While she was in the bathroom, Alan got up and inspected the house. The tingling sensation of the intruder still lingered in that ancient, reptilian part of his brain. But as usual, the house was empty.

  When he returned to the bedroom, Heather was already asleep, the blankets tucked underneath her. As he watched, he initially thought the movement beneath the blankets was her leg … but then he realized it was occurring at the center of her body. Something was moving on her stomach beneath the blankets.

  Or inside her …

  He flipped the blankets off her without waking her. She was wearing her cotton nightgown, but it had grown tight as her pregnancy progressed, and he could clearly make out the smoothness of her belly beneath the fabric. As he stood over her, he saw something move beneath the fabric, as if someone were slowly running a finger across the other side of her nightgown. He watched the bump circumvent the swell of his wife’s belly until it vanished completely down the opposite side.

  For the first time since his initial conversation with Hank about the lake, all those many months ago, he remembered something Hank had said about some woman who had backed over her Doberman with her car, breaking its hip: She carried it to the lake and the hip was healed. But later that winter, the dog gave birth to a litter of puppies that all came out… well, they came out wrong.

  His heart was beating too fast in his chest.

  (they came out wrong)

  He spent the rest of the night sitting up in bed, not sleeping.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Christmas morning, they exchanged gifts while Christmas music lilted out of the stereo. Afterwards, Heather retreated to the kitchen to prepare a large breakfast—scrambled eggs, sausage patties and bacon, sliced fruit, heavily buttered toast.

  While she cooked, the smells of the food wafting throughout the house, Alan went out onto the porch. He smoked a cigarette, chilly in his sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt, and saw Landry’s cruiser parked down the block. Was the son of a bitch actually keeping tabs on the house on Christmas fucking morning?

  Just seeing the sheriff’s car made him angry. His ulcer began to flare up. It had been several days since he’d been to the lake, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. Also, Heather’s water jug was getting low. It was nearly time for a refill.

  By the time he finished his cigarette and went back inside, Heather had laid out breakfast on the kitchen table. They ate together, Alan in predominant silence, Heather humming along with the Christmas tunes coming in from the living room.

  When she got up to refill Alan’s coffee, she stood beside him, her protruding belly at his eye level. “Do you want to sing to your kid?”

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and placed them against the front of Heather’s stomach. “Hello-ello-ello …”

  Heather laughed.

  He took the coffee, then told her to go soak in the tub and that he would take care of the dishes.

  “Can’t argue with that,” she said, already heading down the hallway. “Merry Christmas to me.”

  He cleared the table, dumping the leftover food in the trash and stacking the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, all the while keeping one eye on the windows that faced the street. Landry’s car hadn’t moved.

  “Cocksucker,” Alan growled.

  He returned to the living room and lowered the volume on the stereo—weeks of Christmas music was beginning to grate on him—and proceeded to gather up the torn and crumpled balls of wrapping paper he and Heather had left strewn about the floor. He was halfway done cleaning the mess when he picked up a ball of red and green paper to find a single tiny vine beneath it, growing straight up out of the floor.

  It was as if he’d been stung by an electric cattle prod.

  Son of a bitch …

  It was late December, and though the weather wasn’t as cold as the winters up north in the city, it was surely too cold for goddamn vines to grow, wasn’t it?

  It was sprouting from the same place he’d seen it last time: right up through the narrow slit between two floorboards. But this time something new occurred to him, and it was because he also noticed (for the first time) the faint blond grooves in the floorboards that had been made months ago by Jerry Lee. It had been this exact spot that had so agitated the old golden retriever. Even now, Alan could recall the dog’s steadfast determination in digging up … well, something… from that particular spot on the floor. At the time, both he and Heather had found it somewhat peculiar, even somewhat amusing, but had never truly given it much thought. Now, however, the memory caused a nonspecific unease to course through Alan’s body, chilling his blood to ice.

  As he’d done before, he wrapped his finger around it and gave it a sturdy tug. The sound of it breaking free was akin to plucking a taut rubber band. He went out back with his cigarette lighter and lit the end of the vine like the fuse on a stick of dynamite. The vine was dry enough to burn freely, and Alan held it by one end until he couldn’t hold it any longer without getting burned. He dropped the charred bit into the grass where it hissed as it hit the frost.

  Again, he looked out across the street at Landry’s police car.

  There are other ways we can go about this, Landry had said.

  “We’ll see,” Alan muttered into the atmosphere.

  He hurried across the street toward Landry’s police car, half-expecting the sheriff to step out of the car before he ever reached it. But there was no movement from within, and as Alan approached, he began to doubt if the car was even occupied.

  It wasn’t.

  He stood there peering in through the windshield at the vacant police cruiser and suddenly felt like a goddamn imbecile.

  They were playing with him.

  They were making him out to be a fool.

  Of course the son of a bitch wasn’t sitting out here on some ridiculous stakeout on Christmas morning. No. Hearn Landry, county sheriff, was at home celebrating Christmas morning with his wife and boneheaded kid. The bastard had just parked his car here to make Alan think he was being watched. Oh, that clever motherfucker …

  Alan couldn’t help it. He laughed in spite of himself.

  Then he kicked a dent in the driver’s side door before heading back inside.

  That night Alan dreamt—or thought he dreamt—that tiny wet hands were on him. They poked and pinched and snatched up fistfuls of his pubic hair. At one point, he imagined he could feel the little creature on his stomach, wet and warm and sticky with odorless fluid. It slid down between his legs and snaked beneath the bulb of his testicles. More tiny, clawlike fingers—poking, prodding, pinching.

  Seeking entry.

  He awoke as always, terrified and disoriented, and spent much of the night searching the house for invisible monsters.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Heather found Alan early the next morning, naked and asleep on the floor in the living room beside the sliding glass patio doors. She prodded him with her toes, and he snapped awake so quickly, it caused a kink in his neck.

  “Sleepyhead,” she intoned, standing over him. “What are you doing on the floor?”

  He looked around but had no answer for her. The last thing he could remember about last night was checking under the couch for more vines. The fucking vines, it seemed, were driving him crazy.

  He stood up just as it occurred to him that he had been lying in the exact same spot where he had found Jerry Lee’s corpse all those months ago. He recalled without difficulty the details of that morning … and how one of those horrible birds had been pecking at the glass door, a blazing hunger in its soulless black eyes.

  Alan showered, still thinking of Jerry Lee and that spot on the floor where the dog had dragged its claws and how that one single vine kept reappearing. Cold weather be damned, those goddamn vines were determined. By the time he dressed—black dungarees, long-sleeved T-shirt, pullover—and had a cigarette on the front porch, he was already contemplating tearing up the living room floor.

  No need for that. Alan remembered something he’d seen when he’d first moved into the house and began cutting the vines away from the siding. He hopped off the porch and went around to the side of the house that faced the woods, crouching until he could see the semicircle divot in the earth and the tiny wooden door against the house’s foundation.

  The crawl space.

  Dropping to his knees, he leaned forward and brushed dead twigs and leaves aside, scooping more dead leaves and brambles out of the divot. It dropped down about two feet. The door looked much too small to accommodate an adult male, but when he got up close to it he figured it would indeed be possible for him to wiggle through it and gain access to the underside of the house.

  But did he want to?

  He shivered, and it was only partially due to the cold.

  There was a latch on the little wooden door, a hooked handle threaded through a rusty eyelet. Alan undid the latch and pried the door open. It squealed on rusted hinges. A smell like rotting vegetation rushed up and accosted his nose, strong enough to make his eyes water. There was a deeper smell from within, too—the danker, headier scent of rotting meat.

  Realizing he would need a flashlight, he hurried into the house and got one out of the pantry, then hustled outside before he lost his courage.

  Bending down before the opening beneath the house, Alan clicked on the flashlight and shined the light into the square doorway.

  Dust clouded the beam of light, falling like confetti in a snow globe.

  Either I’m doing this or I’m not.

  He counted to ten in his head, then swung his legs down into the hole and pushed his feet through the opening.

  Indeed, it was a tight squeeze. His shoulders barely cleared the doorway, and for one horrifying moment, he feared he might get stuck. But he managed to climb all the way through and soon found himself crouching beneath the house in a space that was maybe three feet high.

  He turned the flashlight toward the center of the crawl space, and his breath caught instantly in his throat.

  His first thought was, It’s alive.

  His second thought was, That’s the goddamn heart.

  In fact, the entire assemblage was suggestive of the inner workings of a living creature—all the organs and veins and arteries and bands of musculature accounted for. The heart was at the center, a pulsating, gel-coated muscle approximately the size of a grown man’s head, dangling like an immense hornet’s nest from the beams at the center of the crawl space. As he watched, the thing actually appeared to respire like a single lung taking in and releasing air. Branching off from the heart was a network of intertwined veins, crisscrossing the beams in the ceiling of the crawl space and burying themselves into the soft soil. The veins themselves were as thick as power lines, layered with rows of thorns that looked more like the teeth of a deep-sea behemoth.

  The veins were vines, hundreds of them, and they weren’t diving into the ground but sprouting out of it. The heart at the epicenter was not actually a heart—not in the traditional sense, anyway—but some strange purplish plant. What Alan had at first mistaken for respiration was in fact the curled fingers of tricornered leaves rustling in the breeze coming in through the open crawl space door.

  Nonetheless, the sight was horrifying.

  We can’t live here. This house is poisoned by those things.

  Like the voice of a ghost, George Young Calf Ribs spoke up in the center of Alan’s head: The lake is like a magnet. Your house is the closest thing to it. It’s too close to the forest and sits on the soured land. Your house rots with you and your wife in it. Rots like carrion. Vines keep it tethered to the soil like a balloon. They are channels, conduits, for the transfer of power. You can cut them away but they grow back. They come up through the earth. They are the lifeblood, the beating veins, of that house now.

  Twenty minutes later, armed with an electric saw and an entire box of Glad trash bags, Alan went back beneath the house and began cutting. The vines were thick and stubborn, and they bled their juices on him. He tried to uproot them from the soil, but many of them seemed to pull farther down into the earth before he could grab them. When he took the electric saw to the dangling mass of tissue-like fruit that looked so much like a heart, it cracked down the center like an overripe watermelon smashed against a rock. It vomited greenish gunk onto the ground and spattered Alan’s clothes with it. Its insides reeked like fecal matter, and twice Alan had to climb out of the crawl space for fresh air.

  It took him much of the afternoon to cut the vines down. When he was finished, he had filled five extra-large trash bags with the foliage. He was exhausted, his muscles strained and weakened, and his mind was already returning to a quick dip in the lake as he dragged the trash bags out to the curb.

  This time, Hearn Landry was across the street, leaning against his parked cruiser and smoking a cigarillo.

  Alan froze, glaring at the man, his hands balled into fists around the plastic pull straps of the trash bags.

  Casual as could be, Landry raised a hand in Alan’s direction. He looked like a lazy sheriff in an old western.

  Fucking cliché, Alan thought, practically snarling.

  He continued carrying the bags to the curb, ignoring the sheriff as best he could. A number of buzzards had alighted on the trees at the opposite end of the property toward the street. They weren’t as big as the ones Alan had been seeing lately, but their presence was no less daunting. This was the closest he’d seen them to the road since he’d moved into the house; something about their nearness to civilization—to the other houses on the street—carried with it the sensation of impending doom.

  He wiped his hands on his pants, surveying the crowded trees. He counted five birds weighing down the boughs.

  Hearn Landry glanced up at the buzzards. Then he tipped his hand down over his eyes and zipped up his parka.

  After he’d finished with the trash bags, he went back inside and tugged off his smelly pullover and dungarees while still standing in the foyer. The muck from the podlike plant had dried to a vomit-brown crust on the front of his pants and pullover.

  Heather was asleep on the couch. She had a book opened on her chest, Everything a Mommy Needs to Know (and a Few Things More), and she looked almost childlike in her stretchy maternity pants that were still too big for her. A band of white belly flesh protruded between her pants and loose-fitting blouse. At that moment, Alan was overcome by the sheer love he had for this woman and temporarily forgot about Hearn Landry, Hank Gerski, and even the lake at the end of the wooded path through the woods. It was just the two of them again, young and in love, having each other’s backs, and they couldn’t be touched by the world. Couldn’t.

  The band of exposed flesh rippled. Something was moving beneath the skin.

 
The baby.

  A bitter taste flooded his mouth. As he watched, a distinct handprint stretched the skin of his wife’s stomach, tiny yet perfectly and hideously detailed, all five fingers—

  (biohazard bag)

  —accounted for.

  A second hand, its little fingers splayed, pressed against the inside of Heather’s womb. The skin stretched like putty. Both tiny hands pushing out. Alan imagined a seam appearing at the center of his wife’s stomach, a vertical mouth that gushed blood and amniotic fluid onto the couch cushions, and it widened as those two hands conspired to tear out of Heather’s womb.

  Heather was right but she didn’t know it, he thought, too terrified to move. You are the intruder. You are the violator. You are the thing I sense moving about the house at night. We are not alone because you are here with us. I just didn’t know it at the time. But I do now. I do now.

  The litter of Doberman pups. What had Hank Gerski said? They came out wrong.

  They came out wrong.

  Between the two handprints, a face appeared. He could make out no other details other than the convex shape of a smallish skull identifiable by the nub of a nose at its center.

  In her sleep, Heather moaned.

  “Leave her alone.” It was his voice, but he did not think he’d spoken.

  The face moved from side to side, as if shaking its head in slow motion. Each time it turned to afford him its profile pressed up against his wife’s flesh, he could see the suggestion of a sharp little cheekbone.

  “… me …” Heather groaned from the couch.

  He wanted to rush to her but didn’t want to touch her.

  The face retreated. One of the hands pulled away, too. The first hand lingered a bit longer, its fingers working individually against the tautness of Heather’s flesh.